Can X-men recover as an IP now that Marvel owns it cinematically again?
Can X-men regain it’s glory?
Remember the time when X-men is the most popular superhero team in the Marvel Universe? Yes, at a certain point, X-men was more popular than the Avengers. What happened? Well, Marvel is responsible for that.
Back in 1993, Marvel was financially suffering. As a mode of Survival, they sold the movie rights of X-men and the Fantastic 4 to 20th century Fox. I am not really a fan of most X-men films because they took way too much liberties that it’s revolting. The only X-men film I liked is Logan. Years later Marvel tried to get X-men back so it can join the MCU but Fox refused.
It made Ike Perlmutter, the then CEO of Marvel, decided to replace mutants with Inhumans. Being a Mutant is part of the X-men mythos hence making them a Fox property. It started by retconning the state of being mutants by many characters. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were offsprings of Magneto. A retcon happened in the comics. Wanda and Pietro are now Inhumans.
Perlmutter is so confident that inhumans will take the place of Mutants in MCU that he made this badly criticized abomination:
Perlmutter wanted an erasure of mutants even in 3rd party crossovers. Marvel vs. Capcom series have X-men characters as roster regulars and favorites. In Marvel vs. Capcom infinite, X-men characters are not on the roster. Capcom is instructed to use MCU characters only. The game bombed because fans got upset. Also for the first time, A Marvel vs Capcom game was not involved in the tournament line up of Evo. Evo is the biggest fighting game e-sports tournament and Marvel vs Capcom games use to main event.
The Last two Fox made X-men movies also bombed in the box office because of lack of promotion. The sales of X-men comics continue to decline. Some story plots alienated many fans like Wolverine, Cyclops and Jean Grey is now a Polyamorous throuple. Iceman coming out of Gay after decades of being straight and many more stories that alienates fans from buying comics. If they want LGBT representation in X-men they can make new well written characters or use underutilized ones. X-men is inclusive and diverse after all. The decision with Iceman is straight up Pandering, Making him bisexual might make sense because he have multiple genuine romantic relationships with many women like Polaris throughout the years. Him being just gay made all those romances fake and not real.
Also fans got angry with Marvel’s attempt to make this “Zoomer friendly” iteration of X-men happen.
Thankfully, a fan backlash got it cancelled from making the shelves.
Now that Disney purchased Fox, Marvel fully owns the X-men again but it is now damage goods. Introducing X-men members in MCU is part of the healing process.I think Storm will be introduced in the Black Panther movies. Rogue is speculated as a villain in the next Captain Marvel film.